Dr. Kevin A. Richards

The Ohio State University

Abstract: This paper examines the literary and popular usage of the metaphor of hunger in the Kino-Debatten between 1909 and 1922. In a discourse, the repetition of certain phrases and usages that rely upon a conceptual metaphor to structure their symbolic message indicates the level in which the conceptual metaphor is integrated into cultural life and can strongly influence thoughts, feelings, and decisions when routinized as part of a cognitive heuristic. I propose that during the early twenties, the repeated and wide use of hunger as a concept to describe the audience’s desire for new sensational images in German cinema in the Kino-Debatten indicates a broader acceptance of two conceptual metaphors working to structure the understanding of this popular medium. The two conceptual metaphors that are the focus of this study are IMAGES ARE FOOD and THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, which are at this time disseminated broadly and in turn allow for insight into the analysis of two masterpieces that critically engage in a self-reflecting appraisal of the value of art in society and the desire of the new audience despite their limited reception; namely F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Franz Kafka’s Ein Hungerkünstler (1922).

THE CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR OF MODERNISM “HUNGER IS DESPAIR” IN THE

KINO-DEBATTEN, F.W. MURNAU’S NOSFERATU, AND KAFKA’S EIN

HUNGERKÜNSTLER CONTENTS The Conceptual Metaphor of Modernism “Hunger is Despair” in the Kino-Debatten, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Kafka’s Ein Hungerkünstler ..................................................................................................................................... 0

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 1

Rilke’s „Panther“ and the Effect of Visual Spectacle ................................................................................................ 2

Rilke, Kierkegaard and Kafka ............................................................................................................................... 4

Conceptual Metaphors in Silent Film................................................................................................................... 5

Conceptual Metaphors in the Kino-Debatten (1910-1922)....................................................................................... 6

Metaphors of Modern Life.................................................................................................................................. 8

The Insatiable Hunger....................................................................................................................................... 10

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)........................................................................................................................... 13

Copyright 2014 © by Ke vin Richards . All Rights Res e rve d.

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Disrupting the Metaphor .................................................................................................................................. 15

The Shadow of the Vampire.............................................................................................................................. 16

Franz Kafka’s Ein Hungerkünstler .......................................................................................................................... 16

Kafka and Kierkegaard ...................................................................................................................................... 17

Kafka and Kino.................................................................................................................................................. 18

Hunger ............................................................................................................................................................. 19

Kafka and the Kino-Debatten ............................................................................................................................ 20

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................... 24

Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................................... 25

INTRODUCTION

This paper examines the literary and popular usage of the metaphor of hunger in the Kino-Debatten between 1909

and 1922. In a discourse, the repetition of certain phrases and usages that rely upon a conceptual metaphor to

structure their symbolic message indicates the level in which the conceptual metaphor is integrated into cultural

life and can strongly influence thoughts, feelings, and decisions when routinized as part of a cognitive heuristic. I

propose that during the early twenties, the repeated and wide use of hunger as a concept to describe the

audience’s desire for new sensational images in German cinema in the Kino-Debatten indicates a broader

acceptance of two conceptual metaphors working to structure the understanding of this popular medium. The two

conceptual metaphors that are the focus of this study are IMAGES ARE FOOD and THE MIND IS A CONTAINER,

which are disseminated broadly during this period and, in turn, allow for insight into the analysis of two

masterpieces that critically engage in a self-reflecting appraisal of the value of art in society and the desire of the

new audience despite their limited reception; namely F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Franz Kafka’s Ein

Hungerkünstler (1922).1 As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe in their Metaphors We Live By (1980),

1 I adopt the capitalization notation used by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By to delineate discussion of conceptual metaphors from that of its function as a literary metaphor.

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conceptual metaphors are used to organize our understanding of abstractions by borrowing knowledge from one

domain (source domain) and mapping this onto another (target domain). Their study allows us to gain insight into

how texts draw upon and engage in contemporary topics by working with, creating variations and literalizing the

underlying conceptual metaphors. In order to fully interpret the metaphor of hunger in modern life, I will draw

upon the reception of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and the concept of despair that had become popular among the

expressionists in Germany that at its height coincided with the aforementioned period of the Kino-Debatten.

Before examining Kafka’s deconstruction of the drives of modernity to master nature as absurd and self-

destructive, Rilke’s poem “Panther” offers us an example of the usage of metaphors of entertainment and

spectacle in the form of images and containers, of hunger and desire, as central to awe-inspiring power intended

to grip the audience, as did the power of the steam locomotive, as a central attribute of the modern aesthetic.

RILKE’S „PANTHER“ AND THE EFFECT OF VISUAL SPECTACLE Der Panther

Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris

Sein Blick ist vom vorübergehn der Stäbe

So müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.

Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,

der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,

ist wie ein Tanz vor Kraft um eine Mitte,

in der betäubt ein grosser Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille

Sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,

geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –

und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. Rainer Marie Rilke (1902)

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Rainer Marie Rilke’s “Panther” captures the intensity of modern life at the turn of the century in the cat’s

paradoxical “weichen Gang” and “starker Schritte” depicting physical agility, flexibilty and strength of movement

that both inspires and frightens its audience. The focus of the panther is not its beauty, but rather the inability of

the cage to tame its vitality and to effectively contain this. Its “grosser Wille” remains “betäubt” behind “tausend

Stäbe.” The spiritual nature of the beast, its great will, has been subdued behind iron bars. This domestication of

the savage beast reads easily into the colonial fantasy of traveling abroad and harnessing nature; a conception that

includes the mastering of other living beings, such as other men, women and children. The panthers juxtaposition

to its audience exemplifies the harnessing and taming of nature by man for the pleasure of man and in turn,

the deadening of the senses, the loss of freedom, and ultimately, the dismissal of nature to the bars of industrial

steel.

An aspect of the transformation of the natural world through industrial mechanization is the biological self

conceptualized as machine. If we look at the panther as an example of nature understood as machine, we notice

Rilke describes him as if he is a piston ever circling his cage, forever turning “im allerkleinsten Kreise” such as a

“Kraft um eine Mitte.” From the eyes attuned to the panther pacing ever in constant motion, we can move to the

locomotive wheel driving its passengers forward through space, and into the reel of film that brings the audience

through imagined time, both set upon tracks with a precise destination, with precise times, and with passengers

heavy with anticipation for what they might see along the way. A problem arises with the certainty of industrial

progress in that it confounds the thought of a final destination, thus stranding the believers in a state of

anticipation of arrival that whenever a goal is reached it is only replaced by a divergent or loftier one. In cinema,

this traps the viewer into believing that at film’s end they would arrive elsewhere, only to have the lights return to

the hall and they realize they are precisely there where they began. The traveler of progress, of linear narrative,

and of cinematic futures is in a state of perpetual motion and exhaustion, which is evident in the tired “Blick” of

the panther. The panther, despite his power, has become the spectacle of a life distracted by empty images, a life

without reflection. The images enter his eye, but these dissipate within his heart, and ensure that only emptiness

remains behind the “Vorhang der Pupille.” In the end, the beautiful panther is both powerful and pathetic as the

spectacle of its captured and subdued will awakens a sense of despair within the viewer and they gaze upon their

own station as a restless dulled audience seeking life vicariously through the images offered by a modern industrial

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society that cannot satisfy. This is the despair of the modern age. Rilke’s treatment of despair in this poem

coincided with his study of Kierkegaard and presents us with a similar situation that we find Kafka in as he is

writing the hunger artist. The two works are comparable in a number of ways, so that an examination of the their

reception of Kierkegaard is warranted and will be the focus of the next section.

RILKE, KIERKEGAARD AND KAFKA

Rilke’s poem presents us with an insight into the mechanism of despair, as we are further distanced from the

dangers of nature, the cage of modern life weakens even the most graceful and powerful of creatures, boring it

with the never-ending consumption of the spectacle of the audience and the empty relationship to them as

established by the ideological structure of the zoo. Despair was described by Søren Kierkegaard as the Sickness

unto Death (1849); the weakening of the spirit in an ever-more material world. Kierkegaard discussed three forms

of despair as “not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be oneself, but also despair at being oneself”

(Kierkegaard, The Sicknes unto Death 1). These correspond in kind to the three life stages of his philosophy of

inwardness, which are the aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The first life stage is characterized by a sensual and

unreflective nature that is unaware of itself as a self. These are the circumstances in which we find the panther,

and through Rilke’s use of ocular semantic elements, he combines the sensuality and pleasure of vision with the

unconscious nature of the beast. This culminates in the final lines in which the heart of the panther is conceived of

as a container of those images that enter into it through its eye. The panther, not knowing of itself as a self, is in

Kierkegaard’s first state of despair evidenced by its weariness to see, the repetitiveness of its circular movement,

and of its lack of awareness of the world beyond its cage.

Rilke’s engagement with Kierkegaard is well documented, and after he read Kierkegaard in translation, he began

learning Danish in 1904 for the sole purpose of reading Either/Or and other works of Kierkegaard’s ( (Hale 74).

Kierkegaard describes two life stages in Either/Or, that of the aesthetic, who is directed by his senses, and thus

ultimately trapped by them, and the ethical, in which one is freed to some degree, at least from one’s senses, by

the decision to live in accordance with a moral code. This turn inwards is a way in which meaning could be

generated by the self (thus creating a self), and it supports the idea that the construction of a self is an act of will

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as well as an act of separation from a mindset of the masses. We see the aesthete in Rilke’s panther, whose

inability to reflect upon the image leaves him unaware of the world beyond his cage. The act of reflecting is an

inward separation from the world and central to Kierkegaard’s process of developing a sense of the self and key to

holding the image as memory, so that it does not “hört im Herzen auf zu sein.”

While Kierkegaard’s works enjoyed limited reception in Germany before 1909, his ideas gained a broader audience

among the literati in 1910 through Ludwig von Ficker’s Der Brenner (Schulz). Concepts of alienation, abstraction,

angst and despair had become central to the critique of the modern industrial age and in particular, Kierkegaard’s

contributions and the reception of Either/Or worked its way into the cultural critique of silent film in the Kino-

Debatte. It was during the period of debate from 1910 until the end of the 20s that the fear of the new cultural

medium was at its greatest as it began to compete more directly with literature as a legitimate narrative art form

(Kaes 2-3).

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN SILENT FILM

The fragmented and distancing stylistic elements of silent film allowed it to be a ritualistic experience of the feeling

of alienation to life and nature in modernity. Its audiences would witness firsthand the relativity of time and space

as the illusion of objects raced across the screen, eventually introducing in narrative cinema subjects with whom

the audience could identify, imitate or reject. Elements that brought the audience an explicit view of their

fractured modern life were the mouths that moved without sound, pantomime, the fragmentation of the narrative

with inter-titles, the perception of manic activity heightened by variable frame rates that ranged from 12 to 26 fps,

and the tinting of film to indicate emotional moods; all in order to provide the audience a concrete experience of

Plato’s spectacle of light and shadow. It was not until the introduction of talkies that a form of realism entered into

cinema in the late twenties, coinciding with the end of the most heated arguments of the debate. As Paul Coates

explains, “…the cinema does not begin with realism but with modernism, with an alienation of our everyday

experience of reality that is then dispelled by the coming of sound, with its enhancement of realism…“ (Coates 18).

The advent of sound lessened the alienating effect of silent film, so that it could now offer more complex

narratives that reached beyond the restrictions of the solely visual spectacle.

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In the Kino-Debatte, silent film came to represent the modern urban life with an audience described as the masses

(Menge). One that eagerly visited the cinema to consume what its critics considered to be cultural garbage, or

Kitsch. In particular, there was a disdain for the pleasure seeking nature of the masses and the silent film’s

attractiveness to that group that appeared in most of the critiques. Several conceptual metaphors are introduced

into the debate, which, coincidentally, can be easily categorized in the philosophical divisions of Kierkegaard’s life

stages. The most prominent conceptual metaphor is a modification of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s IDEAS

ARE FOOD from their groundbreaking Metaphors We Live By (1980), adapted to film as IMAGES ARE FOOD and

which is accompanied by the MIND IS A CONTAINER, so that the mind is to the image as the stomach is to food.

Other conceptual metaphors that will be discussed are FILM IS SEDATIVE and that MODERNITY IS ACTIVITY.

The application of conceptual metaphors to an analysis of the Kino-Debatte will in turn provide insight into the

expressionist reaction to the debates in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Franz Kafka’s Ein Hungerkünstler

(1922). It is important to remember that a conceptual metaphor is the understanding of a target (typically

abstract) domain through that of a source domain (a material manifestation) operating often unconsciously in

cognition. The evidence for a conceptual metaphor is found in the use of semantic elements related to the source

domain that appear in the target domain, therefore, the analysis will begin by examining the conceptual metaphor

of IMAGES ARE FOOD as it develops in the Kino-Debatten.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN THE KINO-DEBATTEN (1910-1922) For the masses, eating is not a reflective or spiritual experience, but rather a concrete, necessary experience in

which a material, yet perishable good is consumed for the nourishment and/or enjoyment of the physical reality.

Because it is necessary, eating and drinking are not conceived of as addictive because our bodies and minds will

not operate for long without performing these actions, but taken in excess, they define gluttony – an immoral act

of oversaturation that conflicts with the medieval edict of maze. In contrast, abstract pleasures are not as

immediately necessary to our survival, and since they exist in the mind, something such as the consumption of an

image or text and its resulting effect upon the development of the mind and spirit when taken to excess is an

obsession, a mental addiction. Because of the nonphysical and abstract nature of image consumption, its

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comprehension relies upon a conceptual metaphor (a borrowing from a similar relationship to the physical world)

to picture the process and the pleasure we receive from reading a good book, listening to new music, or watching

a satisfying film. We can represent the cognitive relationship mapped from the concrete domain to the abstract

domain as IDEAS ARE FOOD, SOUNDS ARE FOOD, and IMAGES ARE FOOD for the mind, which in turn is conceived

of as a place where these images are processed, just as food is in the stomach and intestines, so that when

examining the MIND IS A CONTAINER as a conceptual metaphor, the container is one that processes the image.

This relationship allows the audience’s desire to fill the mind with pleasurable images, sounds, and ideas to be

conceived of as hunger, much like the lust-as-hunger conventional metaphor identified by George Lakoff (Lakoff,

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind). This also allows us to describe our

preferences as tastes (Geschmack), and comprehend ideas by digesting (verdauern) them. In the Kino-Debatten,

the conceptual metaphor of IMAGES ARE FOOD is used almost restrictively to express the insatiable desire of the

Menge to view films and carries with it a very negative connotation. While a term, such as Geschmack remains

neutral, Hunger symbolizes a collective and mechanical addiction to filling a base animalistic necessity. Film is most

likened to Schundliteratur as immoral and developing immorality in its viewers as opposed to Literatur which is

seen as developing morality. Kierkegaard’s aesthete would be the unreflective consumer of low culture, while the

ethical, because of his moral development, would be aligned with high culture, so that the metaphor of IMAGES

ARE FOOD describes the aesthete’s taste for immorality.

An early example of the cinematic imagery of food coming into the debate is in Alfred Döblin’s 1909 article

describing a hypothetical visit to a Panoptikum in which the films depict violent and disturbing symbolic and literal

images of consumption. The first film he discusses is that of torture administered via a mouth-pear (Mundbirne) to

a delinquent. It is not a depiction of the act of consumption, but rather the combination of immorality with a

punishment that prohibits consumption by painfully tearing the jaws apart. The mouth-pear is a ball made of four

sections that when inserted into the mouth is opened outward by the turn of a screw. The pear expands outward

until it eventually breaks the jaw of the delinquent. Döblin then follows this image with a description of another

selection available at the Panoptikum, this one of Prince Bismarck, who Döblin refers to as the giant potato

(Riesenkartoffel) dining upon the caviar of an opened sturgeon (Döblin). Döblin’s choice of images are both

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disturbing in their fragmentation and in the juxtaposition of their depiction of high and low social strata and the

differences in the satiation of their hunger in terms of low culture. In the first instance, the spectacle of the

tortured boy provides the allegory of the emptiness of the images as he is fed the inedible as well as the moral

message to the masses of its consumption, while the prince dines upon the refined food of aristocracy with

pleasant company amidst the veil of hierarchical if not moral superiority. Döblin summarizes this experience by

dismissing film as a medium of low culture intended for the masses, especially targeting youth, who “brauchen die

sehr blutige Kost ohne die breite Mehlpampe der volkstümlichen Literatur und die wässerigen Aufgüsse der

Moral”, while the “Höhergebildete” rejoices that at the very least, films are silent (Döblin). In his critique, Döblin

reiterates uncritically that message that the film presented him with; the image that perverted the act of eating

performed upon the youth is begotten through immoral tastes, while the upper class are free to dine as they

please and they are respected and revered for their refinement. Döblin describes the film as a bloody fare (blutige

Kost) thereby equating the abstract of the image with visceral imagery of consumption as food. He continues his

criticism with the dismissal of popular literature as a doughy-mess (Mehlpampe) and its intended morality as

watery infusion “wässerigen Aufgüsse,” further extended and relying upon the metaphor that equates the image

with food. Döblin implies in his closing sentence that film is a product of and for the lower classes, it lacks tradition,

and it is amoral.

Another use of the conceptual metaphor of IMAGES ARE FOOD in early articles and reviews of the Kino-Debatten

comes in the September 1910 edition of Lichtbild-Bühne, in which the anonymous author of “Neuland für

Kinematographentheater” describes the desire of the restless city dweller as that of “der Bilderhunger im Kino

befriedigt” (Anon.). This hunger for images that the cinema satisfies is described as a particular development

owing to the mundane life of the industrial city worker and the need for an escape from the concrete walls of the

city. Before examining the further development of the concept of hunger applied to cinema audiences, we’ll shift

our attention to two other important conceptual metaphors that will provide further insight into the analysis of

Murnau’s Nosferatu and Kafka’s Hungerkünstler.

METAPHORS OF MODERN LIFE

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A second conceptual metaphor that is activated in the Kino-Debatten alongside hunger is that of MODERNITY IS

ACTIVITY, which is used by authors to critique cinema as a non-contemplative, empty, and unproductive medium

that is inherently immoral (in terms of a capitalist society). The narrative limitations of silent film combined with

the manner of their production provide few alternatives to audiences other than spectacle. This in turn, provides

us with a conceptual metaphor to describe the psychological effect of viewing a silent film in that period as FILM IS

SEDATIVE. These metaphors work together to describe the relationship between a silent film and its viewer as

described by its critics. Life in the industrialized city is fast paced and hectic, yet ruled by limitations of time and

space, so that upon entering the cinema, the screen creates the illusion of a space beyond its four corners and the

manic activity of the silent film mesmerizes the audience to stasis, whereupon the activity of the actors can

substitute for the activity of the viewer as the images playing out upon the screen becomes a ritualistic sacrifice of

motion in which the mindlessly busy can escape. Both metaphors imply an unconscious and unreflective nature in

the moviegoer, whose leisure consists of watching someone else conduct themselves frantically across the screen,

so that they can observe others as if themselves in order to distract themselves from the time and reflection

required to develop a self.

An early Kino-Debatten critic, Egon Friedel, describes modern life as “kurz, rapid, gleichsam chiffriert, und es hält

sich bei nichts auf…etwas Knappes, Präzises, Militärisches“ and likened the scenes of a film to watching a

landscape rush by as a passenger peers out the window of a train, concluding that film has something

“Skizzenhaftes, Abruptes, Lückenhaftes, Fragmentarisches” that best captures the modern perception of reality

(Friedel). It is the abruptness, the silence, and the fragmentation of the narrative of the early cinematic experience

that stylistically expresses the process of alienation of the viewer from themselves, while still only providing a

glimpse, or a promise, to the complexity of life lurking within its narrative simplicity.

Another critic, Walter Hasenclever, thought silent film to be the medium best able to represent modern reality in

that it is defined by its constant “Aktivität” in which a director uses “Raum und Zeitlichkeit” for the “Hypnose von

Zuschauern“ (Hasenclever). The presentation of the hustle and bustle of city life is contained upon the screen,

effectually substituting its activity for that of the viewer. The modern life of the cinema goer is compounded by the

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fragmentation of time through the binary division of the week into periods of work and rest, thus leaving little

opportunity for those nigh exhaustion to reflect and therewith have the opportunity to develop a self. To

counteract the growing sense of dread, a modern city dweller seeks the distraction of spectacle to inhibit self-

reflection during periods of rest. The continuous search for suitable distractions becomes part of the Aktivität of

the modern city dweller, who then finds comfort within the alpha-waves produced by viewing silent films, and its

hold upon them produced by intense sensorimotor processing of film and its resultant decrease in gamma waves

(Burns and Anderson). The viewer is both sedated by an increase in alpha-waves and becomes unfocused from a

decrease in gamma waves in the brain. Such an addictive mix becomes the goal of the weekend or end of the

workday as it provides the viewer a release from the fetters of time and activity, and they can lose themselves, or

rather their self, in their leisure. In the industrial modern society, the compartmentalization of industrial

employment disassociates the individual from the knowledge of production, thereby condemning him to mindless,

repetitive labor, and while the mind may drift into the rhythm of alpha waves with such work, the unforgiving pace

and lack of stimulus never provides the orienting effect created by quick visual movement. The worker’s trance, a

slumber of the mind born of the mundane, emerges from the physical exhaustion and mental atrophy

accompanying the decoupling of labor from craft, and thus the existential crisis (alienation) arises in which a

worker needs distraction from the endless repetition of the same task.

THE INSATIABLE HUNGER

In1913, Moritz Heimann called silent film a plague (Pest) that leaves its audiences with nothing more than a „fast

schreckliche Leere, eine unbeschreibliche öde Traurigkeit, den ganzen peinigen Vorwurf des Müβiggangs“

(Heimann). Heimann’s description of a plague that brings emptiness and sadness from the accusation of idleness

hinges on the conceptual metaphor of the MIND AS A CONTAINER in order to describe the emptiness (lack of

images) after leaving the theater and returning to everyday life. This can be better understood through the

psychological effect of inducing a viewer to an intense barrage of stimulus that is gone upon leaving the theater. In

terms of Kierkegaard’s life stages, this emptiness is the condition of the aesthete, in that he seeks to fill his mind

with sensory pleasures, while the ethical would delay such pleasure in order to allow time for its choosing or

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refusing. According to Kierkegaard, both of these life stages are doomed to despair, and the one who is distracted

from knowing himself, suffers the least.

This emptiness brought up by Heimann is taken up again in 1921 by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, who identifies it as

the condition of the masses in modern society and proposing that the cinema can have a positive effect by

allowing temporary anxiety and distracting audiences from their “eigentümliche fade Leere der Realität, die Öde”

and provide them their fantasies, which they themselves are no longer able to dream (Von Hoffmannsthal, Der

Ersatz für die Träume). It was during this period that Hoffmannsthal engaged intensively with Kierkegaard in

translation and referred to him repeatedly in his diary (Schulz 325). Hoffmannsthal made it clear that Kierkegaard’s

philosophy was integral to his world view in Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache, and in particular the Augenblicks-

philosophie in which a leap of faith brings the eternal to the moment and erases both past and future for the

individual who has moved into the religious life state (Henning 273). To sit at this precipice, however, without

taking the leap, only leaves one with a better view of the chasm of despair as it is pulled clearer into focus through

the suffering of continued failing attempts of the self to emerge by establishing its own moral code decoupled

from its past and with a future that is easily swallowed whole by the emptiness of infinite space and time. This

emptiness that Hoffmannsthal describes being felt by the audience is the despair of the aesthete, who is unaware

of a self, who exists only in the moment. It is an inauthentic despair born of the ignorance of the self-deception

that s/he possesses a history and a future. This emptiness is an abstract construct using the conceptual metaphor

of the MIND IS A CONTAINER understood to be empty of sustenance, empty of images that prop such dreams

sated by the cinema. This emptiness can be conceived of as the hunger of the mind which in turn can be

attempted to be filled with the consumption of stimuli in the form of images, ideas, music, etc. Heinrich

Lautensack specifies in 1913 that this hunger is not for substance, but rather for the pleasure and enjoyment of

living in the eternalized Augenblick that cinema provides (Lautensack). It is a paradox of a moment that is extended

and can be enjoyed and repeated as long as the film stock lasts. This envelopment in the moment distracts and

keeps the masses unaware of constructing an authentic self, so that the film provides the viewer with the pleasure

of distraction and shifts his view from the chasm to the screen.

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With the advent of expressionist cinema, the conceptual metaphors of MODERNITY IS ACTIVITY, FILM IS SEDATIVE

and IMAGES ARE FOOD that are driving the criticism of silent film in the Kino-Debatten are embraced by

expressionist directors as elements of the fantastic. Their films explore these concepts as themes of the modern

subjective experience and translate the anxiety of pushing away knowledge of the self and therewith despair back

into the cinematic image. Using the conceptual metaphor of IMAGES ARE FOOD to fill the emptiness of the MIND

IS A CONTAINER, the concept of hunger is mapped onto the abstract domain of the consumption of film as it

resurfaces in the critique of film during this period of the Kino-Debatten.

Screenwriters, authors, poets and dramatists began to refer to the silent film audience deferentially as the hungry

mob. Willy Haas speaks of the Nervenhunger of the audience, Bertolt Brecht of their “unbegrenzte Fähigkeit, Kitsch

zu fressen,” and Gerhard Hauptmann makes use of the metaphor implicitly and explicitly in his argument (Haas;

Brecht). Hauptmann writes in the pamphlet for F.W. Murnau’s “Phantom” film in 1922 about the relationship

between the cinema and its audience, likening silent film to a food staple.

Der Bedarf an Kino-Schöpfungen ist so gewaltig, daβ man diese geistige Nahrung recht wohl, ähnlich wie Brot und Kartoffeln, ein Volksnahrungsmittel nennen kann. Einem fast grenzlosen Konsum hätte also eine entsprechende Produktion zu genügen. (Hauptmann)

Hauptmann notes that the ever increasing demand for film threatens to make any film economically unviable.

Unlike the other staples, audiences demand ever greater variety in their films. Film is an abstraction, a deception,

but even its illusion has limits.

Ein Weizenkorn bleibt ein Weizenkorn, die Kartoffel ist stets die Kartoffel: es wird hier mit gleichen Mitteln immer das wesentlich Gleiche hervorgebracht…nicht mit dem Munde und nicht mit dem Magen, sondern mit hungerndem Auge harrt, besteht die Menge auf einer unerschöpferlichen Mannigfaltigkeit…

Hauptmann believes that the pace of cinema is unsustainable and that unlike the seeds of a plant, the film

audience craves an ever greater variety with a hunger that simply will not be satisfied as if building up an addictive

tolerance. The motivation to turn profit drives studios to deliver ever more unsatisfying films into production for

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the audience’s hungry eyes to consume. Ironically, it is Murnau’s other film released in 1922 that engages more

directly with the concept of hunger through fantasy. Luckily, despite the court order for all copies of Nosferatu to

be burned, it had already been distributed worldwide, so that it is still viewable today. Though its reception was

restricted at the time, Nosferatu has since become a groundbreaking and popular film that alongside Das Kabinett

des Dr. Caligari is recognized as one of the most iconic films of expressionist cinema.

F.W. MURNAU’S NOSFERATU (1922)

On March 4th, 1922, Nosferatu was screened at a special event in Berlin and received general praise from reviewers

(Prinzler 179). Like other expressionist films that came before it, Nosferatu relied upon fantastic and psychological

elements which had been identified by Georg Lukács as the strength of the silent film in that it could offer the

viewer,“eine innere dritte Dimension” that reflected a subjective psychological experience (Lukács). The

expressionist cinema had an affinity for those themes of modernity that Kierkegaard (along with Hegel, Marx, etc.)

had worked through, such as alienation, anxiety, despair. Nosferatu, in particular, epitomized the concept of

dread; namely the “attraction and repulsion, revulsion and desire” for freedom and its resulting anxiety (Grunes).

More than any other expressionist film, Nosferatu suffers from the Sickness unto Death, as the vampire symbolizes

a self that is aware of itself, so that Count Orlok is what Kierkegaard describes as the “UIykkeligste” that “ikke

kunne dø, der ikke kunne slippe ned i en Grav” (who could not die, who could not slip down into a grave”)

(Kierkegaard, Samlede Vaerker 195). Count Orlok presents the audience with the dead image moving, living as the

living watch immobile in their chairs. As their alter-ego, the audience lives through the dead as he incorporates

symbolically the empty container into which they can pour their imagination, the empty grave into which they can

leave and walk with him across the living shadows upon the screen. The audience has entered a pact with the fiend

by feeding upon the images of the vampire feeding upon his victims. Mulvey’s gaze of audience desire is

incorporated and embodied in the image of the undead vampire as the quintessential symbol of the modern age.

The viewer vacillates between identification with the predator and his prey without diminishing the hunger for the

image, as each spectacle anticipates another ceaselessly until dawn breaks and the light of day dissipates the

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vampire from the bed chamber and the audience from the hall. The figure of Count Orlok stands as a symbol of the

emptiness of modern life presented to the audience in its horrific form, yet held at arm’s length on the other side

of life in the moving dead images and under the veil of fantasy and horror. It is Heimann and Hoffmannthanl’s öde

and leere Realität of modern life that has become an embodied Pest infecting the world and playing out before

them. The Count’s hunger heightens the audience’s anxiety of the empty grave, not the grave of salvation, but the

empty grave of one who has defiantly willed himself into being while never making the leap across the precipice of

despair through faith, thereby suffering all the greater from their knowledge of their separation from both past

and future to be trapped in an enigmatic entropy. The façade of the fantastic allows the voyeur to glean pleasure

from the observance of their own emptiness reflected and embodied in the creature, after all, his suffering is

greater, while theirs is the suffering of the unaware, and his spectacle inhibits their reflection that would otherwise

lead to an awareness of their condition. The MIND IS A CONTAINER in Nosferatu is an empty one, and the vampire

as well as the audience attempt to fill themselves with images without addressing the underlying condition of the

hunger. The hunger can never be satisfied because the vampire has rejected the infinite within the moment as the

act of a self upon the precipice and the viewer is simply distracted from such knowledge but enjoys such suffering

intuitively as the repressed is allowed its own cathartic moment.

The enigma of Count Orlok stems from the conflicted identification and rejection by the viewer of the vampire as

both the object of fear as well as the object of identification. The figures upon the screen do not allow for subject

positions as literary figures do, because of the inherent external nature of the image – often taken as superior

evidence of life and character, it lacks the insight into motivation and drive, remaining forever the superficial, only

intimating these as notions of the dream world of the cinema that are forever vague and foggy because the viewer

cannot enter into the other’s mind and thought, only their perceptions.

The viewer vacillates between identifying with the drives of the vampire, the curse of his emptiness and his hunger

for life, and in turn, they are allowed to fear the level of his despair, and can sense it within themselves, that if it

were acknowledged would offer no respite from the real fear of the shadow and darkness that loom over them in

the form of the question of the empty grave…who is unhappier, the viewer of the grave, or the man who should

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occupy it? For Kierkegaard it is the man who refuses the grave, for he knows what the viewer does not, and has

willed himself to live on despite such knowledge. While the viewer is unaware, he who left the grave lives without

any past and future and is swallowed into the abyss.

DISRUPTING THE METAPHOR

At the same time that Murnau provides the audience with a mirror into their psychological life, he reduces some of

silent film’s alienating factors previously identified by Egon Friedel as the “kurz, rapid, gleichsam chiffriert”

experience of modern man. Count Orlok’s slow movements confound the typical erratic pace of commercial

cinema. The metaphor that MODERNITY IS ACTIVITY is countered by Max Schreck’s slow moving body to provide a

sense of foreboding that in comparison to the often quick and jerky reactions of his victims, equates slow

movement with the death he represents. The deliberateness of his actions indicates to the viewer that the victims

are unaware, but the vampire is not, that although he may be cursed with a hunger shared by the audience, this is

a shadow that has become aware of a self. The despair of the man who walks out of the grave is not the same as

those who stare upon its emptiness. The viewer becomes passive, submitting their will to watching, as the vampire

becomes active, slow and deliberate.

Nosferatu threatens by slowing down the pace of modernity, and therewith threatens the viewer to halt and turn

inward. The viewer sees the process of turning inward in the film, as Nosferatu’s victims are entranced, slowly,

sleepily, and submissively allowing the vampire to feed his hunger. The vampire’s effect upon his victims mimics

that described in the Kino-Debatten as the effect of cinema as FILM IS SEDATIVE. The viewer observes Orlock’s

calling to his victim, as it is also a call to the viewer to escape from time and space into the moment that is the dark

dream of undeath and despair.

The invitation is further extended via a crucial difference between Henrik Galeen’s screenplay and Bram Stoker’s

novel in that there is no actively opposing protagonist of the kind Dr. Van Helsing represents, which could offer the

audience an alternative role to identify with. Instead, the victims seek out the Count, as the viewer seeks out the

film, and amidst the attraction and psychological tension between the Count and his victims, he offers them a

solution that would only further their hunger for sensory distraction.

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THE SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE

Murnau’s metronome-structured final scene presents the viewer with the ephemeral shadow of the count as it

stretches out across the screen, symbolic of Hoffmannthal’s emptiness that oozes “wie schwerer Honig aus den

hohlen Waben” (Von Hoffmannsthal, Ballade des äusseren Lebens). The shadow of the vampire extends across the

screen in a Lichtspiel of light and shadow. The silent film with its technical restriction to visual imagery has its

strength in bringing the audience into the dream of the mythical instant, where there is no future and past, and

reality moves forward frame by frame. The instant is captured and edified by the mechanical repetition of frames

joined together and played at varying speeds, that either elongate or shorten the moment of anticipation and

anxiety as time is transformed into the conceptual space within the borders of the screen that despite its

confinement of the image provides the illusion of vastness. The image before the eye is controlled, manipulated,

and constructed to eliminate the spatial and temporal restrictions of the real world; film is with this eradication of

space and time, as well as past and future, the embodiment of despair. It is the illusion of movement, the shifting

of perspective, and the spectacle of the fantastic that mesmerizes the audience.

As Nosferatu approaches his victim in the final scene, his shadow lurks ever closer, and the audience is enthralled

by the image cast by the flame upon the cave wall. The viewing of Nosferatu as well as the film itself embodies the

experience of Plato’s allegory within its final scenes. As the shadow of the vampire moves ever closer, the

audience anticipates its arrival, and experiences the unfocused fear of anxiety, making explicit the connection

between illusion and form, as the superficial, aesthetic freedom of the creature captures their attention, until the

apparition takes form upon the screen, at which point the audience is relieved in degree as finality arrives to the

perpetual moment. And just as the man leaves Plato’s cave, so too does the audience leave the cinema and the

break of light dispels the shadow’s form back into the recesses of the mind.

FRANZ KAFKA’S EIN HUNGERKÜNSTLER

“Ein Hungerkünslter” can be interpreted as a very personal story for Kafka. It laid out in graphic detail the spiritual

dilemma, the artistry, and the ultimate demise of its author. Shortly after its publication, a debilitated Kafka would

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enter a sanatorium where the tuberculosis affecting his lungs and larynx would make it increasingly difficult to eat.

Despite this setback, Kafka would continue to make corrections to the Hungerkünstler from his sickbed until his

death (Diet). In the summer of 1924, Kafka succumbed to complications of tuberculosis and had apparently starved

to death (Pohland), so that “Ein Hungerkünstler” became Kafka’s tragic farewell to the world.

KAFKA AND KIERKEGAARD

Kafka began reading Kierkegaard extensively in 1918 and, in particular, he occupied himself with Either/Or, and

Fear and Trembling in the Schrempf translation (Schulz 335). In addition to the aforementioned works by

Kierkegaard, Kafka kept Repetitions, Stages along Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, and

The Arrows in the Flesh in his library (Crimmann). Although Kafka’s intense engagement with Kierkegaard is well

documented in his diaries and journals, very little of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is explicitly stated by the author to

have influenced his works. Scholarship has often been vague about making connections between Kafka and other

works, such as Eric Heller’s comparison of Fear and Trembling with scenes of Das Schloss, in particular the Sortini

scene and Abraham’s dilemma that had originally been pointed out by Max Brod (Heller 176-7). Nevertheless,

Kafka’s affinity to Kierkegaard is unmistakable and can be seen in Johannes Urzidil’s speech held at his funeral

service in Prague.

Weil er um die Wahrheit willen mit seinen Gestaltungen kämpfte, zerbrach er sie; er zerbrach sie, weil er das Innere zeigen wollte, ihre innere Wahrheit. – So scheint es mir, daβ er nur einen Bruder hatte: Kierkegaard – und nur einen Leitspruch: Daβ nämlich nur der bis ans Ende beharrende selig wird. (Born 58)

In the same speech, Urzidil mentions the impact that Knut Hamsun had upon Kafka, someone whose early works

Kafka also noted at length to have admired (Friedrich 34; Born 58). Hamsun’s breakthrough novel Sult (1890), or

hunger, is considered to be the first work of expressionist literature in Europe and had a tremendous impact on

the movement in Germany. The expressionist style that drew praise from Kafka was the Norwegian author’s

episodes of hallucinations weaved seamlessly into the first person stream of consciousness narrative, thereby

creating the uncertainty in the reader as to whether the narrator was presenting a literal or subjective portrayal of

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events (Freiderich 34). In Hamsun’s Hunger, it is the narrator’s starvation that brings about the hallucinations, and

this is not without religious parallels. In Either/Or it is the sovereignty of the ethical life over desire that can best be

expressed through the inhibition of the most basic drives of life, such as hunger. To acquiesce to hunger is to give

in to the demands of the body and its unreflective necessity, so that hunger represents the connection we have to

the material world and therewith also our suffering. Fasting, on the other hand, is a well-established symbolic

behavior representing a static, spiritual, and sometimes political journey that includes visions that are esteemed to

reveal inner truths. The status of the fasting artist becomes contested during the modern age, so that the miracle

of the medieval loss of appetite is interpreted as a neurotic behavior (Gooldin 29). What was once considered a

vision is deemed to be a hallucination and this fundamental question about what is real finds its way into literary

and cinematic works of Expressionism.

KAFKA AND KINO

Hunger was a central metaphor used in the Kino-Debatten to criticize the medium, likening audiences to

unthinking masses that ravenously consumed IMAGES AS FOOD. Consumption and hunger was always used in

terms of criticizing film and other forms of popular media, and because of the establishment of this metaphor,

fasting or refusing to consume images, the implied alternative to viewing or filming cinema, reading or writing

literature, could be understood as the spiritual work of fasting. In this way, Kafka’s Hungerkünstler presents us with

a hunger artist and his replacement of Rilke’s bestial panther in the symbolic opposition between two life stages,

that of the aesthete and the ethical. The hunger artist denies himself his hunger via his commitment to a particular

morality, but he is also one who suffers because of his knowledge of a self that is caught in the eternal moment,

yet unable to make the leap required to remove him from despair. The beast suffers less as his unreflective nature

does not hinder his consumption, but nevertheless the aesthete is also trapped within the cage of life.

Kafka’s Hungerkünstler can be read as a contemporary corollary of the Kino-Debatte as an analogy of high and low

culture. Kafka was, after all, an avid moviegoer before his illness limited his movement. He also had close contacts

with those involved in expressionist cinema, such as Albin Grau, the set designer of Nosferatu (Elsaesser). There is

the chance that Kafka even visited the set of Murnau’s Symphonie des Grauens, as Peter Andre Alt suggests Kafka

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would likely have visited the castle Oravsky during the shooting of the Transylvania scenes by Murnau, Grau and

crew and believes to have found vampire passages inspired by Kafka’s visit in das Schloss (Alt).

Kafka never mentions having viewed Nosferatu in his diaries and he passed away before it was premiered in

Prague, but he most likely knew of the film given his contacts and interest for both literature and film. We do find

Kafka’s observation on film’s effect upon the audience in his diary that “die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug

vorbeifährt” as one that links it directly the most iconic symbol of modernity in the train and ist impact upon the

audience that both numbs and shocks (Kafka, Tagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift). While it remains

uncertain whether any of Kafka’s writing was directly affected by the viewing of Murnau’s production, we can see

the theme of hunger is a dominant one in both Nosferatu and the Hungerkünstler as well as in the most heated

contributions by authors to the Kino-Debatte in 1922.

HUNGER

The hunger artist is an enigma. Understanding the abating of hunger as a turn from the material world towards

that of the spirit can be traced as far back as the story of Esau and Jacob in Genesis, in which the hairy and

muscular first-born Esau relinquishes his birthright because of his hunger. In a very similar way, Kafka’s hunger

artist is juxtaposed against a cannibal in a deleted section as well as being replaced by a panther in the published

version. Kafka’s juxtaposition of these figures elevates the goals of the hunger artist to that of a spiritual figure that

rejects such carnivorous or predatory instincts.

The developing of the will through the abatement of hunger brings us again to the division between the aesthetic

and the ethical life stages of Kierkegaard. The animal is not aware of its self and epitomizes that which the hunger

artist is not: an unreflective, powerful, meat-eater. The hunger artist, on other hand, wills away the hunger,

thereby strengthening his sense of will, and his awareness of the self. As objective doubt arises from his observers

and audience and as his audience dwindles until no one remains to provide any objective observance, the hunger

artist becomes fully isolated, and must become his own judge, and his lack of appetite turns him inward to himself.

Outwardly, the miracle is understood as a deception and the spectacle a farce. The cage is forever present, and

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despite his best efforts to suffer the self away, the hunger artist is trapped by the despair of not being able to

reach beyond to any presence beyond the moment.

In contrast, the panther is unaware of a self, just as Rilke’s panther, and thus it eats without hesitation. The hunger

artist represents the final stage of despair as he is in the process of “dying unto the world” by removing himself

from its material basis. We can see that he is acutely aware of his predicament in the final paragraph and that this

only causes his despair to be greater. The hunger artist dismisses the” Bewunderung” of his actions and admits

that he “…kann nicht anders…” (Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler). He explains that it was not willpower; that his

suffering was not as others thought it to be, but rather it boiled down to a Geschmackssache that separated him

from the panther and the cannibal in that he “nicht die Speise finden könnte, die mir schmeckt, hätte ich sie

gefunden, glaube mir, ich hätte kein Aufsehen gemacht und mich vollgegessen wie du und alle” (Kafka, Ein

Hungerkünstler). This confounds even the despair of the artist identified by Kierkegaard as the deepest form of

despair, a despair of defiance, in which the artist understands his despair and tries to alleviate it by hoping his

suffering might lift him above his base nature, only to find that “the more consciousness, the more intense the

despair” (Kierkegaard, The Sicknes unto Death 44). The artist according to Kierkegaard suffers because of his failed

attempt to lift himself above his despair through suffering, as an act of will, but Kaka’s Hungerkünslter feats are

effortless, and his negation of the material world does not provide him with the transformative suffering he

thought it would. He suffers because he exists.

KAFKA AND THE KINO-DEBATTEN

Kafka’s hunger artist is a spectacle that the masses have grown tired of. The spectacle of the hunger artist relied

upon the belief that the fasting was a “miracle,” but as these beliefs waned, another spectacle takes his place, that

of the powerful and hungry beast. At the beginning of the narrative, the hunger artist pronounces that he used to

have the following effect upon his audience, that they observed him “staunend, mit offenem mund,” and that

there were subscriptions, and even night viewings “bei Fackelschein” (Kafka). The effect that the hunger artist

claims to have had is the same Kafka observed of the cinema audience in that they “erstarren” at the sight of the

powerful locomotive moving towards them. It is a reaction conjured by spectacle. Over time, the hunger artist’s

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relationship to his audience changes, so that his feats of starvation become doubted, even his handlers doubt

them, which torments him even more, since they have the closest contact with him, and isolates him in a way that

he is truly only able to create meaning for himself in his work through an ethical commitment to his art, his

starvation. Finally, he lies dying in a pile of straw and reveals with a whisper that he simply lacked the appetite.

After his death, his spectacle is soon replaced by the unconsciousness of the panther that appeals to the new

Geschmack of the audience. While this story can certainly apply to the actual demise of hunger artists as an

attraction, there is much more allegorical and mythical weight to Kafka’s narrative and style. His consistent use of

categories to designate the figures in his text, as well as the use of unspecific space and time create a mythic text

that, a text without a past and future, much like the hunger artist himself, who separates itself from history and

strives for the eternal (Deinert). The narrative, however, does not separate itself from its period, but rather

through the metaphor of hunger, it engages in the Kino-Debatte by representing the replacement of a spiritual

spectacle (the hunger artist) with that of a material spectacle (the panther) and the shift from a reflective and

contemplative entertainment to that of an unreflective, awe-inspiring demonstration of brute power. The highly

allegorical nature of the text has already been examined by Benno von Wiese and Meno Spann as a comparison

between high and low culture, but it is the role that hunger plays within the conceptual metaphor of

IDEAS/IMAGES ARE FOOD and the philosophy of Kierkegaard that allow the narrative to be both mythic yet also

relevant to and engaging in debates of its period.

The Kino-besucher are described as ravenously consuming with their hungry eyes the sensational, trivial and

stimulating silent films. Willy Haas called it a “Nervenhunger,” Hoffmannsthal referred to it as a “Hunger nach dem

bloβen Stoff,” and Hauptmann labeled it a “Volksnahrungsmittel,” all of which imply that viewing a film for the

cinema goer was a base activity fit for the uncivilized, just like eating is for the animal. Brecht refers to the process

as “fressen” a word reserved for the manner in which a beast would consume something. Consumption does not

require conscious thought, and therefore viewing silent films was equated with the mindlessness of eating a piece

of bread. It did not develop the intellect, but rather only satisfied a primitive urge. As the debate developed, the

hunger blended with the metaphor that the MIND IS A CONTAINER and the emptiness that characterized modern

life brought ever more audiences to the cinema hungry to fill themselves with the IMAGES of the lives of others,

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only to leave dissatisfied because they were only postponing the recognition of their own despair and returning to

the cages of their own lives. The audience member was constantly in danger of becoming aware of their despair

throughout their everyday, when activity stopped, and thus the escape that cinema offered them became an

addictive tool used to numb themselves through an overload of sensation lacking physical activity; a “philistinism”

that “tranquilizes itself in the trivial, being equally in despair whether things go well or ill” (Kierkegaard, The

Sicknes unto Death 43).

The relationship of the new medium to its audience is evident in the way the new spectacle, the panther, differs

from that of the old, the hunger artist.

In den Käfig aber gab man einen jungen Panther. Es war eine selbst dem stumpfsten Sinn fühlbare Erholung, in dem so lange öden Käfig dieses wilde Tier sich herumwerfen zu sehn. Ihm fehlte nichts. Die Nahrung, die ihm schmeckte, brachten ihm ohne langes Nachdenken die Wächter; nicht einmal die Freiheit schien er zu vermissen; dieser edle, mit allem Nötigen bis knapp zum Zerreißen ausgestattete Körper schien auch die Freiheit mit sich herumzutragen; irgendwo im Gebiß schien sie zu stecken; und die Freude am Leben kam mit derart starker Glut aus seinem Rachen, daß es für die Zuschauer nicht leicht war, ihr standzuhalten. Aber sie überwanden sich, umdrängten den Käfig und wollten sich gar nicht fortrühren. (Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler)

The panther represents the “Freude am Leben” sought in consumption in the lexical items such as “Nahrung”,

“schmeckte”, “Gebiβ”, so that the metaphor of the hunger of the audience can be symbolized in the physical

manifestation of the new spectacle. The image of the well-fed, lively panther is the food for which the audience

hungers. The panther mesmerizes the audience in that same way that FILM IS SEDATIVE for its audience who

“wollten sich gar nicht fortrühren.” The spectacle of the panther reproduces the effect of the cinema mentioned

both by critics in the Kino-Debatten and noticed by Kafka, an effect, which the hunger artist used to instill in the

children of his audience in “andere Zeiten.”

Kafka’s panther awakens even the “stumpfsten Sinn” from the “öden Käfig” just as we have seen in the

psychologizing of cinema by Heimann and Hoffmannsthal. The conditions of modern life instill emptiness within

the viewer and as the film stimulates the senses, it numbs the spirit. The stimulation brought the viewer relief

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through a distraction of his self and therewith a reprieve from his despair in that the film made the moment,

without its past and future, all the more palpable. This is what Lautensack meant when he mentions that film

provided its audience with an escape by constructing another life to be watched, and to live within the

“Augenblick” of the film, and that other self that had been exonerated from the restrictions of time and space. The

audience is criticized for forgetting their own lives, only to have their despair rush back as they return to the

conscious awareness of the self as the exit the theater and return to their own past with their own future.

For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability or into the mad-house it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, shows it off, imagines itself to be the master, does not take note that precisely thereby it has taken itself captive to be the slave of spiritlessness and to be the most pitiful of all things. (Kierkegaard, The Sicknes unto Death 43)

It is this insight that both the panther and the hunger artist are entrapped in cages, that even the entity that is

unconscious of being a self is entrapped by despair, even though they may suffer less because of their naiveté,

they are nevertheless in a state of despair until they can break from their own narrative (their past and future).

The hunger artist accomplishes this and his efforts release him from the material world, so that the reader may

ultimately wonder whether his accomplishment is the culmination of a successful turn inward to the eternal

moment.

The hunger artist differentiates himself further from the panther in that he is a static being whereas the panther is

in constant motion. There is an inverse relationship of movement between the spectacle and the audience, just as

the crowd rushes past the static hunger artist, the same crowd stops to observe the panther and his

“herumwerfen.” The panther’s body carries with it a “freedom” so that the cage goes unnoticed, thereby offering

the audience a reprieve from their own cages and their own despair. The panther represents the spectacle which

hypnotizes the audience with its activity and can act as a substitute for their own passivity and assume a restful

posture, while their mirror-neurons activate those same areas of the brain as if they were just as powerful as the

Panther, simulating in their pre-frontal cortex those actions as if they were moving.

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Und wenn einmal in der Zeit ein Müßiggänger stehen blieb, sich über die alte Ziffer lustig machte und von Schwindel sprach, so war das in diesem Sinn die dümmste Lüge, welche Gleichgültigkeit und eingeborene Bösartigkeit erfinden konnte, denn nicht der Hungerkünstler betrog, er arbeitete ehrlich, aber die Welt betrog ihn um seinen Lohn. (Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler)

The rejection of the hunger artist furthers his turn inward, but it is only a greater indication of the lack of reflection

and the hunger for moving images that is the effect of the onset and further development of film as a popular

media.

CONCLUSION

Hunger in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Kafka’s Hungerkünstler engages in the cultural debate of the decade on the

perceived dangers of the silent film as a new popular form of entertainment. The power of the image of the new

spectacle (cinema, vampire, and panther) distracts the viewer from their despair and produces the mesmerizing

effect that robs the imagination of the philistine, the audience, the Müßiggänger, and enslaves the mind as a

spiritless container bound to feed upon images that cannot satisfy. In contrast, the hunger artist represents an

attempt to distance oneself from the basis of material human existence by achieving the separation from first the

audience and thereby turning inward to create his world, adhering to his own moral code, and eventually even

escaping the cage of despair through constructing the self within the confines of space and time.

As the silent film moved from a “viewing” to a “telling” medium, the debate and critique subsided, perhaps due to

the employment of script writing that became necessary for more complex narratives that audiences demanded.

The implicit argument of the debate survives today as a question concerning the nature of new media’s

involvement with the psychological and often moral development of the individual. Kierkegaard’s concepts as they

were received in late Wilhelmina and early Weimar Germany gave the expressionist movement a philosophical

justification for a turn inward to a meaning that extended beyond an objective sense of truth and towards a better

understanding and depiction of the human psyche. With urban modernity came both a raised awareness of the

self amidst a newly envisioned alien landscape of the human mind, as well as it presented an opportunity of mass

distraction to those suffering a Sickness unto Death in its “most common form of despair of not being who you

are” (Kierkegaard, The Sicknes unto Death).

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